Seeing a movie won't cost you an arm and a leg at Regal Theaters located in the Hamilton Place shopping center.

CHATTANOOGA Tenn. (UTC/The Loop)– It’s no secret the economy is taking its toll on everyone, but this is especially true for the college students. Between tuition, books, parking passes, lab fees, and all the other 1000’s of ways we pay, there is no money left for students to have a “college experience” and a social life.

As crazy as it might sound there are ways to have a good time out in Chattanooga without sending your bank account into the ER for mouth to mouth. One of the best places that students can go to in Chattanooga is the Regal Hamilton Place 10-17 theaters.

The movies are a traditional place to go and hang out, but most of the time it would cost students three weeks’ worth of their plasma to pay for a good time. Not at Regal. The theater offers concession stand and ticket price specials three days a week, as well as three dollar tickets at all other time.

Regal theaters offer cheap tickets to blockbuster movies

According to the Hamilton County Herald the specials are:

One dollar feature candies on Mondays (with a Regal Plus Membership)

One dollar small popcorn on Tuesdays (with a Regal Plus Membership)

One dollar tickets on Wednesdays (with a Regal Plus Membership)

Popcorn adds to any movie lovers experience, and with ticket prices so low affordability is not an issue

“I love coming to the cheapies,” Wes Hale, a sophomore from Chattanooga said. “It’s nice to get away from campus and all the responsibilities that we [as students] have to deal with all the time. I love bringing my girlfriend here so we can get out of the house for a few hours and see a good movie for cheap.”

The theater is located in the 2000 Hamilton Place Blvd off of Interstate 24. Regal shows second run movies and has showings until ten every night. Show times and movie selection can be found here.

“This movie theater is great to come to when I don’t have a lot of money,” Hale said. “I hope to see the cheapies stay around forever.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UTC/AP) — The Titans have had trouble with consistency the last two years. Tennessee has started fast and fizzled, then stumbled woefully out the gate before finishing strong.

Tennessee opened the 2008 season winning its first 10 games only to blow home-field advantage with a playoff loss. The Titans followed up with an 0-6 start, but did make NFL history — becoming the first team to finish .500 after such a bad start (the team went 10-2 after its winless streak).

Now they need to put two good halves together — start fast and finish strong.

Defensive tackle Tony Brown said he’s seen players committed to returning to what he called “Titans football” since the offseason started back in March.

“The sky’s the limit for this team,” Brown said. “Right now we don’t want to talk about playoffs or Super Bowl … we know we have a pretty good team. We just have to go out and display it.”

Coach Jeff Fisher, entering his league-leading 16th straight season with this team, says what the Titans have to do is simple.

“We need to get off to a good start this year,” Fisher said.

That’s why Fisher tweaked his training camp schedule yet again, putting his team on the field any time from at high-noon to sessions under the lights at night. The Titans are putting in extra study time on some opponents, too, including the Oakland Raiders before the season opener Sept. 12.

They also got younger, letting four starters leave including key leaders:

Kevin Mawae

Keith Bulluck

Kyle Vanden Bosch.

Tennessee now has 10 players in camp 30 years or older including kicker:

Rob Bironas (32)

Kerry Collins (37)

Fullback Ahmard Hall (30)

It won’t be easy. The Titans go into the season tied with Houston for the league’s toughest schedule based on opponents’ winning percentage in 2009 at .547.

“It’s all about us,” Vince Young said. “We’ve got to go out and take care of our responsibilities.”

Young is back as the starter after coming off the bench to oversee that winning finish and improving to 26-13 as a starter. The Titans also have Chris Johnson, the NFL Offensive Player of the Year back looking to become the first in league history to string together consecutive 2,000-yard rushing seasons in his quest for Eric Dickerson’s league rushing record.

Together, Johnson and Young helped the Titans rank second in the NFL in averaging 162 yards per game. Young had his best passer rating yet at 82.8, and receivers Nate Washington and Kenny Britt are much more comfortable in their second season with this team.

“We feel like we’re equipped at those positions to score points,” Fisher said. “We’re didn’t set our goals to go out and win 13-10. We want to increase our points per game. At the same time, we gave up way too many points per game last year. We need to improve both those areas.”

This is the first time since 2007 that Fisher has had both his coordinators back from the previous season, and offensive coordinator Mike Heimerdinger has worked all offseason to rev up a unit that averaged 27 points per game with Young at starter. Defensive coordinator Chuck Cecil’s challenge is bigger, replacing three starters and improving the defense against the pass.

The Titans gave up 258.7 yards passing per game, a figure inflated by a 59-0 loss at New England.

But Tennessee drafted end Derrick Morgan, signed Brown to a new deal and brought in free agent ends Jason Babin and Raheem Brock. With tackle Jason Jones healed up from a shoulder injury that ended his 2009 season and promising Sen’Derrick Marks, the Titans hope to help their secondary with more quarterback pressures and sacks.

“If we can get back to where we were with JJ and the guys rushing up front, which it looks like they’ll be fine with the rotation, it’s certainly going to improve it,” Fisher said.

The Titans do get one break from the schedule. Three of the first four games are at home, which should help avoid a sluggish start. Three of the final five are at home including a tough four-day stretch with visits from Jacksonville and defending AFC champ Indianapolis.

“Just so we don’t start out like we did last year,” receiver Justin Gage said.

The Tennessee Aquarium is taking on another rare-fish rescue, similar to the one the aquarium’s Conservation Institute has been working for the past decade with the Tennessee River sturgeon.

This time, the focus is on the Conasauga logperch.

“Our best estimate is that only about 200 adult Conasauga logperch are left,” said Anna George, director of the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. “It’s federally endangered because it is only found in the Conasauga River. And one 20-mile stretch of river is their entire range in the entire world.”

The Conasauga logperch is one of the rarest darters in North America. The 6-inch logperch lives in the area where the pristine Conasauga water flows out of the Cherokee National Forest into Polk County, Tenn., then ripples southward into North Georgia.

The brownish fish with tiger stripes uses its piglike flattish, pointy snout to flip pebbles on the crystal-clear river bottom, then eats the insects it finds beneath.

“They lay their eggs in the sand, so they need a really clear river, which is part of the reason they’re still hanging on here in the Conasauga,” George said. “It has great water quality and cool clear water coming off these mountains in Georgia and Tennessee.”

Last week, she and other researchers snorkeled areas of logperch habitat to find eight of the elusive darters.

In captivity, the eight, combined with three others now belonging to Conservation Fisheries, will become the Adams and Eves of a captive breeding program much like the one that has brought the Tennessee River sturgeon back from the brink of extinction.

“We’re working with Conservation Fisheries, a nonprofit group based in Knoxville, so we can augment the natural population size here in the river as well as keep an ark population,” George said. “That way if any environmental catastrophes happen in the Conasauga River, we would have fish in captivity that can be released.”

Pat Rakes, a founder and co-director of Conservation Fisheries, said biologists are beginning to get very concerned about the logperch’s future.

“Obviously, this is not something you’re going to find in slow, muddy rivers,” he said. “This is a fish that buries its eggs in sand. It has to have clean sand to lay the eggs, otherwise they’re going to get smothered and die from lack of oxygen.

“Like a lot of our darters, they are canaries in the coal mine. They are a good indicator of water quality.”

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Logperch lessons

Rakes and George said the fish also offers scientists an opportunity to unravel a genetic mystery: How they survive in such a small range and in such small numbers without apparent inbreeding.

“There is far higher genetic diversity than would be expected in that fish, given its small numbers and small range,” Rakes said. “Anna’s hypothesis is that somehow the fish are recognizing who’s closely related with them.”

George, who studied the Conasauga logperch for her doctorate in biology, said she wants to know more.

“We think they’ve adapted some sort of behavior where they seek out other logperch different from them to breed with, and that maximizes genetic diversity,” she said.

It also might explain why the Conasauga logperch never has been successfully bred in captivity.

The researchers are incorporating genetics research on the fish to unravel the mystery. The research will be done by Tennessee Aquarium personnel using lab space and equipment at the University of Tennessee atChattanooga.

Aside from the learning the biology of the fish, researchers said their effort is not just to save the Conasauga logperch it’s also about saving the habitat of the last clean section of the Conasauga River.

“This is one of the last rivers we have in the U.S. that has some of these endangered species in it, and these (the logperch) are just an indicator of how important this habitat is,” George said.

“If we start losing these species, then we stand more at risk for having water that is not safe for humans to play in or drink from, or any of those things we enjoy rivers for.”

Rakes put it a different way.

“When we lose this fish, it means we’ve crossed a threshold with … too much human-caused sediment input,” he said.

“What does that mean to us? It means the stream is getting too nasty for us to use, means we have to spend a lot of money to be able to use it again.

“And if you want to look at it from the tree-hugger way: This is a system that has taken millions of years to be like it is. What right do we have in a few decades to destroy it?”